This week The Captain and I articulated one major difference between us.
I have Land Lust, and he does not.
I want to own at least a decent-sized chunk of earth to play with, to create on, and to give our children a wild space. A suburban block just isn't meeting my needs these days. I dream of something bigger, and more free. I feel like I need that land.
It's not just me, either. My parents own acres of woods and they built their open plan log house with their bare hands. One of our favorite family pastimes is doing a creek walk on their property, and this summer all of us worked together to build a dam across the creek, using river rock. It was so amazingly fun...until the snake showed up in the water...but that's another story.
I know my brother feels the same. He might have scratched that itch a bit with the lovely yellow house, buried deep in snowdrifts, that they owned for the last couple of years near Notre Dame. Maybe in Tanzania he'll buy some ground and plant some seeds?
The Captain's not like that. He loves the flat and endless fields in Holland, as well as the expansive blue sky. He loves the living green-ness of it all. The Dutch landscape is etched in his heart as home, but he does not need to own it. He does not need to possess it.
Even very wealthy Dutch people live on small pieces of land. They might enjoy an expansive view, but not of land they own.
What an interesting difference: Americans with the history of seeking and taking land (rightly and wrongly), with so much land to explore, and the Dutch who have been negotiating a small country for hundreds of years.
It really makes things interesting when we talk about what we both want out of our future purchase of a house here in Australia.
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